Are you planning to update your computer? Are you replacing that old hard drive with a new one? What do you do with the old hard drive? Do you really know what’s on your hard drive? Although you format your hard drive, many of these computers still contain confidential information including passwords, banking information, social security numbers, credit card information, health information.and even deleted information found in the Recycle Bin.

 

If you are in the HealthCare field then HIPPA compliancy should be at the top of your list of concerns.

 

An MIT study conducted by graduate students Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat and published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) found using hard drives mainly purchased on eBay, the students were able to mine over 5,000 credit card numbers, medical correspondence, bank account information, and government employment records. You will need to download Adobe Acrobat to effectively view this study.

 

In California vs Greenwood No. 86-684 , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the right to privacy does not extend to discarded items.

The answer is to sanitize.

Sanitize

To expunge data from storage media (e.g., disk drives, diskettes, CD-ROMs, and tapes) so that data recovery is impossible. Sanitizing includes overwriting, degaussing and destruction. Clearing data does not constitute sanitizing.

To properly sanitize a drive, ALL data must be removed and overwritten at every addressable location on the media. An effective solution writes to active and inactive file space, bad sectors and tracks, the space between the end of a file and the end of a block or sector, file allocation tables, directories and block maps. This process assures information is unrecoverable.


We guarantee our Information Assurance and Security Services for the following Operating Systems.

Microsoft DOS
(All versions)

Novell
(all versions)

Linux
(any distribution)

Windows 3x + DOS

FreeBSD

UNIXWARE

Windows 95 / 98 / ME

BeOS

HP-UX

Windows NT / 2000 / XP

SCO UNIX

IBM OS/2

 

Maintain your data confidentiality!

Call us today-(602)524-4561